Yeah, now you just get a wage ceiling where you're only employable if you're cheaper than the robot.
Yup. Whether related to robots or not, Walmart is DECREASING wages and others may yet follow their ghastly example even as consumer prices and corporate profits soar 🤬
Their explanation of “consistent staffing” didn’t even make sense in a bullshit propaganda kind of way
You could get a job working on the robots
No, it means you won't be able to work and will now have to fight over garbage to eat if you want to survive.
The rich guy already lives in that society. How will he feel superior if everyone else does too?
A robot works harder, does more, performs better and costs less than unskilled workers. A robot also does not harass coworkers or suddenly start working at another company. It would be incredibly stupid to keep hiring people who have no value to the company.
The only risk is that these unemployed proles would suddenly decide to seize the means- oh wait guns are banned
I work with robots in a factory.
A robot is finicky, fails constantly, performs slower, and requires me to fucking babysit the piece of shit all night to deal with faults and errors. Theoretically the robot does the entire job of welding and bending and etching, but in practice they need me to make sure it doesn't shit itself.
I'm sure, at some point, they can replace me. We aren't there yet.
Not OP, but I'm an industrial field tech, my two cents:
"Robot" is a very wide term used for a bunch of different stuff, but mostly for industrial automation devices, which, unfortunately, at the moment are still very dumb. Industrial automation improves output, if your robot really is slower than a human, somebody messed up very badly.
What it doesn't improve, and instead reduces, is adaptability; humans can perceive and reason on a vastly superior scale to a machine, and they can adapt their actions to changing factors in a process much better than a machine can, and they don't need to be programmed for every single possibility.
It'll take a while before machines can replace humans in non-repetitive tasks, but in those task they excel, provided they are properly designed, built and maintained.
Oh it's "faster" but constantly fucks up and needs to retry the same job over and over, so it averages out to being slower than me just manually putting parts into a welding press. Also, constantly down and needs maintenance to come troubleshoot because it's angry that a fixture got stuck sideways in an aperture or whatever.
I suspect they're not actually properly maintained, because the company decided it would be better if there weren't manuals for the robots. They don't want us wasting time reading!
The thing is we already live in that world. Labour saving automation is all around us but we work as hard as ever. My generation witnessed the arrival of the two parent income, women entered the workplace in order to afford better housing and foreign holidays. The result? More expensive housing and latchkey kids.
Are you surprised? The more efficient machines become, the harder humans will need to work to compete.
Edit: People are downvoting this as if it was something I wanted. It just seems like reality to me.
That's the problem with capitalism and competition in capitalism. Everyone competes to maximize cost savings and profit.
I don't know of a solution but this ain't it.
I'm stuck on the typo: "...robots than can work..."
Same here. Ruined the rest of the comic.
Bottom left looks uncannily like Jeff B
"it means these robots will be stealing your souls (via the art you create) & also all your money (they need it more)."
"What, you guys don't have robots?"
- Related "rich elite man" after replacing all of his human workers for robots
In all seriousness tho -- robots require energy (and lots of it) in order to work efficiently. While "any ordinary human" has to pay for his own expenses. Which means, robots will be (best case scenario) a "gimmick" for a selected few and no way a popular thing, in a way that will make all humans irrelevant for ANY kind of job.
tl;dr: It's okay, robots won't take over the world.
robots require energy
So do humans. It's called food. Braindead criticism honestly.
Robots are already a veeeeeeery popular thing. Look at any car factory.
There won't be much difference between those and general purpose AI robots, except that the general purpose ones will be WAY more capable and profitable.
Humans will always have jobs, but that doesn't mean the trend of automation and advances replacing jobs won't continue, and maybe accelerate too.
In the early 2000's there was a documentary on Hyundai's fully automated factory. Required 3 full time workers, all of them maintenance. Every system had redundancies, to prevent the line from shutting down. Parts were delivered by truck (on special trailers that coupled to specific docks that automatically supplied the assembly line) or were made on site. It took 16 hours to fully assemble a car from start to finish and once the assembly line was full, a new car rolled off the line every 24 minutes.
It was something incredible to watch, as the factory was a closed ecosystem. Cameras filmed from behind observation windows used to monitor the activity. Even if an assembly robot was to break, the line would halt, the faulty machine was rolled out automatically through a maintenance line/door and the spare would role in, in a matter of seconds.
It was sci-fi material.
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